Wedding Albums
There is no better way to remember your wedding than with a beautiful bespoke album filled with images of your wedding day.
Many brides have no intention of ordering a wedding album, “No I just want a disc so I can get prints myself,” they say, then I show them my sample albums and suddenly a light comes on somewhere, it’s not just the wonderful quality or the design of the album, they also seem to realise the value of such a personal object.
The albums I offer are produced by hand here in England and are available in a huge range of colours and materials, thus giving you plenty of options. The number of images placed in the album is up to the couple within reason but to be honest “less is more”
Let me tell you why it’s so important to have a wedding album:
My parents have exactly 12 professional images from their wedding. Twelve! I know them inside and out and I could describe just about each image to. How do I know them so well? Well because I've looked at them hundreds of times, and the reason I have looked at them hundreds of times is because they were on display, in an album. An album that was made by a professional, filled with prints made through a professional lab and bound in a book available only to professionals.
When I was little, I was totally fascinated by it seeing my parents looking so young, with my grandparents, and aunts and uncles surrounding them. It was a simple leather book, with the images slipped in and preserved behind tissue but it has held up surprisingly well over time. This year those images turned 71 years old.
But what about the couples who marry today? What if they decide to forgo an album? What if they decide it's not worth the cost? How many images do you really think they'll put into frames? Five? Ten? None? Maybe during that first year of marriage, they'll have a few. But then, children come along. Baby pictures replace wedding pictures in those frames. People move to a new house, and things change.
In 40 or 60 years from now, how many pictures do you think their children will know by heart? How many pictures will they have even seen? Today, a lot of couples think just getting the disc of images is “good enough”
Here's the problem with that thinking it's just not true, not by a long shot. Don't get me wrong, I think that getting the files from your day is great. Today's couples get WAY more images than my parents did, I think it's wonderful that couples get so many photos. But what worries me is that even with that option, it won't mean that today's couples will necessarily be better off. My fear is that today's couples will actually end up with LESS than what my parents got in 1950. Think about it, will the computers of 2050 even have DVD drives? USB ports? Will they even have hard drives? If the past is any indication, the answer is a resounding no.
But do you know what never becomes obsolete? What never goes out of style? Photographs! And not just any photographs. Not photos printed at the supermarket or internet site but professional photographs, printed by a professional lab. Those are the photos you find in a loft. It could be a 100-year-old photo, but it still looks good. Because back then, the paper photographs were printed on was high quality and developing them was an art form. There were no machines that spit out pictures onto cheap paper with inexpensive ink. Whatever these high street shops are charging, it's too much, because those prints aren't worth the paper they're printed on, over time they will fade, and they will curl. They will not stand the test of time.
Your memories are worth more than that. These aren't snapshots from a vacation. They aren't pictures from your latest phone. You cared enough about these moments to hire a professional to photograph them. Follow that through by having a professional print them. Have that professional print the pictures you put into frames and have them design just for you a high-quality wedding album that you will cherish for decades. I know that wedding albums can be expensive. That's for good reason. They are custom-designed books, usually hand-stitched and hand assembled and made just for you. But of all the things you spend money on for your wedding, your wedding photographs are the ONLY thing that will increase in value over time, not monetary value but memory value. As the years pass, you'll be so glad that you have them, especially if you can experience looking through them by flipping through a gorgeous custom-designed album instead of sitting in front of your computer and clicking "next" with your mouse, which with the march of technology will be unlikely anyway! So, figure out a way to make it happen. Figure out a way to afford that album. Forgo a table centrepiece. Cut back on your guest list. Opt out of the vintage car you'll drive in for all of 20 minutes. Please just make it happen.
Don't just buy an album for you! Do it for your children and your grandchildren, because when they root around in your loft in 2060, they will have no idea what do with a USB key any more than they would with a floppy disc!